In five years, the Close to Home Initiative has transformed the experience of youth who come into contact with the justice system in New York City. By prioritizing investments in programs and resources within and around the neighborhoods in which youth live, Close to Home has begun to realign New York State’s youth justice system with research and nationally-recognized best practices that give youth the best chance of becoming productive and law-abiding members of society.

Corrections is worth one-half of the weight in ranking the Best States for crime & corrections. This subcategory is further broken into five metrics: incarceration rate, juvenile incarceration, racial equality in jailing, three-year recidivism rate and sexual violence in prisons.

The recent sentencing of Philadelphia rap artist Meek Mill to two to four years in prison for probation violations committed a decade after his original offense has brought the subject of America’s expansive community supervision apparatus and its contribution to mass incarceration into the public spotlight (NBC News 2017; Jay-Z 2017).

In today’s climate of increased immigration enforcement, U.S. juvenile justice officials must learn how local immigration policies - or a lack thereof - can seriously and negatively impact the lives of noncitizen youth. This guide, which highlights recent policy changes affecting youth in the juvenile justice system, is a great place to start.

Recent data analyses on jail incarceration—taken from Vera’s Incarceration Trends tool—reveal that although significant racial disparities still exist between black and white jail incarceration rates, incarceration rates for black people are declining, while rates for white people are rising. This report dives into the data on black and white incarceration trends from 1990 to 2013, and poses several questions for further exploration that might explain why these rates are shifting.

The American legal system’s thinking about the criminal culpability of juveniles has been radically transformed over the past 12 years, largely as a result of the introduction of developmental science into the United States Supreme Court’s deliberations about the appropriate sentencing of adolescents who have been convicted of the most serious crimes. The author examines the role that developmental science, and, especially, developmental neuroscience, has played in this policy transformation (p. 410).

The proliferation of adult criminal records and their harmful impact on people with convictions has received growing attention from scholars, the media, and legislators from both sides of the political aisle. Much less attention has been given to the far-reaching impact of juvenile delinquency records, partly because many people believe that juvenile records are not public, especially after a juvenile turns eighteen. That common notion is a myth. This Article addresses that myth and adds to both the juvenile justice and collateral consequences literature in four ways.

Legal distinctions related to age provide a unique hurdle for young people in the penal system, who face restrictive rights based on their age in a country that benefits from profit through imprisonment. Understanding the history of youth incarceration requires examining how this country has defined the age of a “child,” and how they should be treated in the eyes of the law.

The brief defines emerging adults as the group of individuals transitioning from childhood to adulthood that, despite facing the worst criminal justice outcomes and recidivism rates, signify a critical opportunity for criminal justice intervention via evidence-informed policies and programming that both reduce crime and enhance socio-economic outcomes.

The review suggests that in general, risk assessments do a good job in predicting recidivism across racial/ethnic groups for diverse populations inside and outside the United States. However, there is still some room for improvement concerning the assessment of risk and needs for ethnic minorities. In addition, while there are some studies that do not report the predictive validity of risk assessment scores across race/ethnicity, risk assessments overall seem to be a promising effort to correctly classify and/or identify juveniles who are at greatest risk for future recidivism.